World Quotes: Living in Community

Our true destiny...is a world built from the bottom up by competent citizens living in solid communities, engaged in and by their places. David W. Orr

Valuing Community

It is not more bigness that should be our goal. We must attempt, rather, to bring people back to...the warmth of community, to the worth of individual effort and responsibility...and of individuals working together as a community, to better their lives and their children's future. Robert F. Kennedy

Each of us must rededicate ourselves to serving the common good. We are a community. Our individual Fates are linked; our futures intertwined; and if we act in that knowledge and in that spirit together, as the Bible says: "We can move mountains." Jimmy Carter

Properly speaking, global thinking is not possible... Look at one of those photographs of half the earth taken from outer space, and see if you recognize your neighborhood. The right local questions and answers will be the right global ones. The Amish question, what will this do to our community? tends toward the right answer for the world. Wendell Berry

We become human only in the company of other human beings. And this involves both opening our hearts and giving voice to our deepest convictions. ...When we shrink from the world, our souls shrink, too. Paul Rogat Loeb

We have all known the long loneliness and we have learned that the only solution is love and that love comes with community. Dorothy Day

When I am with a group of human beings committed to hanging in there through both the agony and the joy of community, I have a dim sense that I am participating in a phenomenon for which there is only one word...."glory." M. Scott Peck

Living Within Our Natural Community

The world of life, of spontaneity, the world of dawn and sunset and starlight, the world of soil and sunshine, of meadow and woodland, of hickory and oak and maple and hemlock and pineland forests, of wildlife dwelling around us, of the river and its wellbeing--all of this [is] the integral community in which we live. Thomas Berry

It would be well, perhaps, if we were to spend more of our days and nights without any obstruction between us and the celestial bodies, if the poet did not speak so much from under a roof, or the saint dwell there so long. Birds do not sing in caves, nor do doves cherish their innocence in dovecots. Henry David Thoreau

Each of us is a living system within a greater living system, connected to each other in more ways than we can fathom. Paul H. Ray and Sherry Ruth Anderson

Our fulfillment is not in our isolated human grandeur, but in our intimacy with the larger earth community, for this is also the larger dimension of our being. Thomas Berry

Embracing Our Global Human Community

The seven of us on board [the Space Shuttle] represented five different religions. But we were all agreed - it just doesn't make sense how people on earth treat each other. It doesn't make any difference what language we speak. It doesn't make any difference what country we come from. It certainly doesn't make any difference what the color of our skin is. We are all children of God traveling on spaceship earth together. Jake Garn

One day our descendants will think it incredible that we paid so much attention to things like the amount of melanin in our skin or the shape of our eyes or our gender instead of the unique identities of each of us as complex human beings. Franklin Thomas

Man is a part of the world, and his spirit is part of the spirit of the world. We are merely a peculiar mode of Being, a living atom within it, or, rather, a cell that, if sufficiently open to itself and its own mystery, can also experience the mystery, the will, the pain, and the hope of the world. Vàclav Havel

All men are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Whoever degrades another degrades me,
And whatever is done or said returns at last to me. Walt Whitman

The golden way is to be friends with the world and to regard the whole human family as one. Mahatma Gandhi

Extending Beyond the Human Community

Perhaps the most poignant image of our time is that of Earth as seen by the space voyagers: a blue sphere, shimmering with life and light, alone and unique in the cosmos. From this perspective, the maps of geopolitics vanish, and the underlying interconnectedness of all the components of this extraordinary living system - animal, plant, water, land, and atmosphere - becomes strikingly evident. Richard Benedick

A human being is part of the whole, called by us "universe," a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separate from the rest - a kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. Albert Einstein

With all things and in all things, we are relatives. Native American (Sioux) Proverb

Relation is the essence of everything that exists. Meister Eckhart

Love all God's creation, the whole of it and every grain of sand. Love every leaf, every ray of God's light! Love the animals, love the plants, love everything. If you love everything, you will perceive the divine mystery in things. And once you have perceived it, you will begin to comprehend it ceaselessly, more and more every day. And you will at last come to love the whole world with an abiding, universal love. Fyodor Mikhail Dostoyevski

I live my life in widening circles
That reach out across the world. Rainer Maria Rilke